Oracle Blog

Living Life in the Zone

Saturday Nov 05, 2005

While doing yard work today, I was listening to a Gartner podcast discussing software licensing. I must say that it put software vendors in a rather capitalistic light. Note that my quote is paraphrased (from memory), not a literal quote. âSoftware vendors do not change pricing models to lose money. The two pricing models mentioned were subscription models (software subscriptions) and dual-core pricing, noting that some customers were requesting utility "pay for what you use" pricing. Note to Gartner, dual-core is about to become passe. Customers are going to have to deal with âmulti-coreâ pricing models from software vendors if things don't change.

Gartner mentioned no vendors, and therefore did not mention that Sun is attacking pricing models head on. With our JES pricing model, customers know what they are getting. Not only today, but going forward. $100 per employee per year with a up to a 5% price increase per year. No surprises. That's a software subscription that is predictable. And you get most of the software on the Sun truck. Plus our desire is to make all of our software open source, and with that will come transparency. Again, no surprises.

The podcast also discussed the impact of virtualization on pricing models. While dual-core is passe, so is âcoreâ in general. How much should a software vendor charge for 1/10th of a core? The concept of âper-coreâ pricing has to go. It is becoming irrelevant, so 20th century.

Customers are starting to take notice. I sat in a meeting last week where JES licensing came up. Customers are taking notice of the JES model. Don't fall for vendors giving you a 3 year fixed-price âall software on the truckâ deal to compete with our JES pricing model. Get in writing what happens years 4+.

I'd be interested in hearing about some alternative software licensing models out there. We all know about the âfree-software-pay-for-supportâ pricing model. I'm sure customers would love to pay 30%-of-list-price-support for that Any ideas?

Friday Aug 19, 2005

Particularly interesting is the comment "Who do we blame?" The first person to blame is the bonehead who wrote the virus. Track that person down and prosecute to the full extent of the law. Punishment? Force that person to browse the web on a 300 baud modem 16 hours a day.

Wednesday Jul 20, 2005

Mr. Enderle, who focuses on personal technologies, suggests that Sun buy Gateway. It's pretty obvious from his article that he is not a fan of what Sun is doing. I think some commentary on his commentary is appropriate to clear up some misconceptions he may be spreading.

On the thought of a Gateway acquisition, I'm not going to bite. I don't see anything productive coming out of that discussion. However, I do want to focus on some of his "orthogonal" points. First, morale.

On the morale point, well, I am not sure how many data points Mr. Enderle has. 1? 10? 50? All I can give you is one. Mine. I had a strong lead for a new job as another company contacted me gauging my interest. My response? Almost verbatum: "First, I'm not interested. Next, what's the job so I can talk to my personal network and filter their skills/interest for you." A Sun-friendly person in a pre-sales role selling cross-platform products? Heck yeah! My personal network has at least as many non-Sun employees as it does Sun employees, so don't read between non-existent lines. This is a pretty darn exciting time as we open up much of our intellectual property portfolio to the world. And we get to blog about it. Now that I am spoiled, I don't know if I could work for a company that didn't give me this much freedom to express my thoughts. Leave Sun? Are you kidding?

On the Sun Ray topic, Mr. Enderle's data may be true to a point. In our sales office we happened to have some servers that were getting long in the tooth. Things were getting somewhat slow simply because you can't push a 400Mhz CPU faster than 400Mhz (not entirely true, but we value supportable configurations). We have upgraded those E4500's in the office to v440's. Now our apps run just fine. My point? Sun Rays are not slow. Servers have to be sized properly. I'm sure most of you have had desktops that have gotten pretty slow and you have also had them upgraded. It's the traditional 3 year upgrade cycle. The only difference in our case is that we upgraded 2 servers and the 100 desktops just ran faster. Our upgrade cycle happened to be 5 years, probably a year overdue but, hey, IT has a fixed budget with a lot of things on it's plate.

If there's commentary, there is most likely commentary on commentary available as well

Tuesday Jun 28, 2005

John Gage mentions social networking in one form or another every year at JavaOne. Oddly enough, John just mentioned promiscuity after I named the title of this blog entry. It's nice knowing that promiscuity is at the forefront of JavaOne

Last night's bloggers meeting was promiscuity at it's best.

Tonight I will further the social network by heading to BOFs. Not sure which
ones yet as that would break the "winging it" rule. In the meantime, here are a few snapshots of last night's festivities. You do not need to be 18 or older.

That blur to the right is Simon Phipps, and I have no idea who the blur to the left is. I must say the blur is pretty accurate as it's how it looked from my eyes after a few too many gulps of alcoholic beverages:

One last blur and then I need to pay more attention to this morning's keynote.

Monday Jun 13, 2005

I'm checking out my referrer list trying to determine why the hits jumped so much in the last 6 hours. I'm going to give credit to the impending release of OpenSolaris source code. I've noticed the comment spammers can't wait either. Even they are getting into the act.

Thursday May 19, 2005

Warren has a good Jini vs. Indigo read. To expand his comment on Jini's protocol independence, one of my favorite articles to this day is Jim Waldo's "The End of Protocols". How many protocols have we gone through in the last 10 or 20 years? How many will we go through looking forward?

When/If you read that article, just do one thing. Add SOAP and WSDL to the list

Tuesday May 10, 2005

The referrer of the day is the Solaris 10 Utilization page. According to the Utilization page, The Clingan Zone is a center of utilization expertise. Where else can you go to see 190 zones on an Ultra 10? That is definitely some serious utilization, even if it is simply swapping all over itself

Then there is the the 600 Zones in 4GB RAM on the v880. That example was more realistic, with each zone running Apache 1.3x (IIRC). The good news is that the v880 is up and running again, waiting for the installation of the Container Manager 1.1.

Here at the The Clingan Zone, we learn how to consume all available resources.

More seriously, thanks to the content editor/advisor of the Solaris 10 Utilization page for the link!

Tuesday Apr 12, 2005

Matt and I decided to hit USENIX '05 last night where Dan gave a presentation on Solaris 10. Dan did blog on it, so check it out if you can. Good turn out. If everyone that was standing in the back actually sat down in a chair, it would have been standing room only

What is amazing to me is that the session was supposed to be from 8:00pm to 10:00pm. It was like the energizer bunny. It kept going & going ... It was closer to 11:30 until we left for the bar. I chickened out at the last minute for the bar and decided to head home and get some sleep. I try to get up early and do the starbucks/blogging thing.

Here are a few pictures I snipped with my cell phone while roaming the session. What was difficult was trying to get a signal to upload my pictures while not looking like I was raising my hand for a question. The visual equivalent of "can you hear me now" I suppose

Update: I apologize for the formatting. It sure looked fine in preview mode. I'm off to a customer and don't have time to fix. Sorry.

Here we are congregating outside the conference room waiting for the previous Red Hat Linux session to end. Of course, that session only went one hour ...

Dan is the blurry blue blob standing in front. Hey, it's a CELL PHONE, not a digital camera. I saw non-blogging heathen and kernel developer David Bustos roaming around with a REAL camera so hopefully those will get posted as well.

A crowd of attendees listening to Dan give his excellent presentation. Dan has a good presentation style. Anyone that can hold a crowd of sysadmins (who are notoriously tough) for 3 1/2 hours with his knowledge, humor and style is a good presenter in my book. Bart and Liane spoke up when their expertise was of benefit (quite often). Bart, dude, you are bordering on the status of non-blogging heathen. You haven't updated your blog in 5 months!

In the lower-right hand corner is what I think is Matt's hand. Now you know what Matt's hand looks like. Although I don't recall him drinking a coke. Hmmm.

Dan was sure right in his blog entry about lots of insightful questions. Lots of questions around predictive self healing, zones, zfs, security and crypto framework, CDDL, performance, etc. Not a shy group.

Here's a shot of Liane post-presentation talking to attendees about the virtues of the Service Management Facility. Liane is one of the SMF developers. To the left is Dan sitting down. After standing for 3 hours, I don't blame him. Liane is presenting tonight on Developing for Solaris and Open Solaris. Liane, I hope to make it tonight and I encourage others to attend as well. The good news is that by the time I got to the Marriot garage, parking was free. You know you have a successful BoF when you outlast the parking lot ticket booth dude/duddette..

Monday Feb 21, 2005

I was out and about this weekend and hit a local retailer. While at retailers I like to walk the software isle and see what changes over time. The computing pharmacy sure hasn't changed, although the medicine has. There are a set of packaged applications that exist simply to fix everything that is broken in Windows.

When I first joined Sun 8 years ago, I used to drag around a copy of a Windows-oriented trade magazine to my show my customers the "Top 10 business software" list. At least 60% of these "business" applications were equivalent to Norton Utilities. In reality, nothing has changed in 8 years. Here is a snapshot I took while I was there. 60% of the applications are still used for medicinal purposes only. What's funny is that these are labeled as "Home Office". For those of you who say that Windows is easy to use, this is what is behind the lipstick on the pig. I don't know about you, but this is not how I want to open the door to my home office, and this is not how I want to spend my time once I get in.

I avoid Windows. However, being pragmatic, what choices does a business have? This is where Sun is working hard to fill in that gap. In particular, the Java Desktop System. Give it a spin. We welcome your feedback.

Wednesday Feb 16, 2005

Check out Alan's blog entry on Red hat vs Sun. Alan's a good read on these types of things. The press is having a hey-day with "... banging the final nail in the coffin for Solaris". I suppose that if your entire product line consists of a hammer , everything looks like a nail :) OK, they do have small, medium and large. They have yet to SuperSize. Now please excuse me while I go make final arrangements ...

OK, \*just kidding\*. The only arrangements I'm making deal with customer Solaris investments. I feel pretty darn optimistic from where I'm sitting (Starbucks in case you were wondering). Solaris 10 is an excellent operating system.

That doesn't mean Solaris is putting a nail in Red Hat's coffin. Saying that would be pure nonsense. When company representatives make claims like like this, the FUD-detector should go off. Just like my hammer and small/medium/large comment. That should have set off the FUD-detector too. My FUD was for a cheap laugh (did it work?). Robertson's FUD? well, that's just pure nonsense.